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Electronic Punks The Official Story

Originating from a thriving rave scene,
the Prodigy soon left their birthplace behind and forged
a highly individual vision for themselves, in the progress
producing some of the hardest and most innovative dance
music of recent years. Along the way, they have endured
a disastrous American tour, financialscandals, press witch-hunts,
industry condescension, and persecution by the authorities.
Theyh ave also earned two gold records, ten consecutive
hit singles, headline slots at huge international festivals
and mercury award nominationm whilist still clinging on
to the underground ethos with which they were born. They
are now established as the most accomplished and successful
hard dance band ever to come out in Britain.

Comments:Everything about the Prodigy! Features
also a few b/w photos from various occasions.

This text is COPYRIGHTED by Martin Roach, author of the Prodigy's biography, "Electronic Punks"

(Independent Music Press 1995 - ISBN 1-897783-04-3)

The musical force behind the band is 24 year-old Liam Howlett, from Braintree
in Essex. His fascination with music began during primary school, when he fell
for Ska and Two Tone, after his father gave him a copy of "Ska's Greatest
Hits". On moving up to secondary school, he was immediately attracted to
the new hip-hop culture, became fascinated by bands like Grandmaster Flash &
the Furious Five, and repeatedly watched the 1984 break-dancing film "Beat
Street".

Inevitably, Howlett wanted to perform his own material and, a couple of years
later, a holiday job on a building site earned him enough cash to buy two cheap
turntables. Soon after, he approached a local hip-hop band called Cut To Kill,
who took him on board as their second DJ. For the next two years, Liam and Cut
To Kill rehearsed hard, although they only gigged sporadically. Aged 18, Liam
passed his A-Level in graphic design and got a job at a now-defunct London freebie
magazine, "Metropolitan", where he struck up a friendship with the
owner.

After playing him a tape of Cut To Kill, Liam was offered £4,000 to record
the band's debut album. Unfortunately, neither the band nor their benefactor
were at all experienced and so the whole budget was mistakenly spent in the
studio, leaving nothing for promotion or touring. To compound matters, the rest
of Cut To Kill then signed to Tam Tam Records behind Liam's back. The deal excluded
him, despite the fact that the band used one of his tracks to win the contract.
This betrayal coincided with Liam's dwindling interest in hip-hop and, following
an incident when a knife was pulled on him at London's Subterania because he
"didn't fit in", he began to look for new musical pastures. It was
the summer of 1988.

While Liam was immersed in hip-hop, his home country was on an altogether different
trip - Acid House, which had engulfed most of Essex in a tide of flares and
ecstasy. The early tunes - like Phuture's 1987 "Acid Trax", and Derrick
May and Juan Atkin's work - were minimalistic musical hybrids, with mind-altering
frequencies, relentless rhythms, unconventional structures and weird, off-beat
soundscapes.

While pure house music tempered it's rhythmic obsession by incorporating more
melodies and harmonies, Acid House pursued rhythm to new extremes, using technology
to create beats that could never be simulated by human beings. Originating in
Chicago and Detroit, the music soon crossed the Atlantic, and took root via
massive illegal warehouse parties that formed the foundation for what became
known as rave. It was the era of the smart bars, the marathon dancing and a
recycled hippy mantra - the second Summer Of Love had arrived.

Liam's first experience of rave culture was a party at the Barn in Rayne (home
to the Shamen's Mr. C). He was immediately converted: "I though it was
the bollocks, such a different experience from what I had become used to. Hip-hop
was such an exclusivist, pretentious scene, and to a certain extent, it always
excluded white bands. Then to experience something like that first night at
the Barn was such a stark contrast, I really loved the music and the whole vibe.
I had never been into dancing that much, but it didn't matter, because you could
enjoy it, you didn't have to dance properly".

Within a couple of months, Liam had started DJ-ing at these parties and become
a well known face on the Essex scene. However, he was still too shy to play
any of the material he had secretly been writing. Enter Leeroy Thornhill and
Keith Flint. Leeroy, all 6'7" of him, was a James Brown fanatic who had
only taken to the rave scene after the monotone Acid House had developed into
something more sophisticated. With his height and lightning-fast feet, he was
the person to dance with at the Barn.

Keith Flint had left school before his exams and taken up various jobs (including
one as an investigative driller), before becoming a 'casual' and then a devotee
of biker culture, smoking dope and listening to 70's legends like Led Zeppelin
and Floyd. When rave arrived in the summer of '88, he was travelling around
the Middle East and Africa, but by the spring of 1989 he was back in Britain.
On his return, he was immediately thrown out of his house - one night he was
sleeping beside the pyramids in Cairo, the next he was kipping next to a river
in Braintree.

A friend of his, Ange, offered him some digs at her house. She was a keen raver,
and when she next went out to an acid house party, Keith tagged along. After
meeting each other at the Barn, Keith and Leeroy became great friends, going
out almost every night and rapidly becoming popular characters at the circuit.

It was then at an outdoor rave that Keith first met Liam. Keith was so impressed
by the tunes Liam was playing that he asked for a tape of his own mixes. Liam
obliged and put four of his own songs on the B-side. Keith and Leeroy played
the tape late one night and after coming back from a late night party and were
stunned by Liam's work. As Leeroy adroitly remembers: "We were buzzing
our tits off". The next time they saw Liam they asked him to play his own
material for them to dance along to. He agreed, and after roping in a girlfriend,
Sharky, the Prodigy was formed. Liam played the keyboards, while Keith, Leeroy
and Sharky danced.

Shortly after, they booked their first P.A. at the Labyrinth in Dalston, East
London, where the promoter told them: "I've only ever had two P.A.'s here
before and they were both bottled off after five minutes". Liam had felt
that an MC was need for the performance, and was put in touch with Maxim Reality
(aka Keeti Palmer), a reggae MC, originally from Peterborough, who had spent
the last three years in Nottingham.

Maxim had got into MC-ing at the age of 14, by watching his brother (MC Starkey)
MC-ing at various Peterborough sound systems. Once in Nottingham, Maxim had
strung up a fruitful musical partnership with a friend called Ian Sherwood,
and the two had christened themselves Maxim Reality and Sheik Yan Groove. Unfortunately,
their brand of unorthodox dance music was highly unfashionable, and after three
fruitless years they split up. Maxim had enjoyed working with Sherwood, so he
went travelling for three months to chill out and ponder his future.

While he was away, he realised music was his first passion, and so on his return
to England, he moved to London. Shortly afterwards, a mutual friend put him
in touch with the Prodigy. Tapes were sent back and forth but their debut gig
in Dalston was at such short notice that the first time Maxim actually met the
band was on the night of the show.

Maxim remembers it as an interesting experience: "I just remember being
put on this stage in the middle of what was a dance scene with four people I
had just met, and I just stood at the back with a mic chatting a couple of times.
Meanwhile, the rest if the band were doing their shit and everybody was going
wild, it just went off. It all happened so quickly it was weird, but really
good. I thought it was really wicked but I didn't think anything more of it
than I wanted to do it again. " Maxim did do it again - a few days later
he was asked to join the band permanently.

With this line-up, the Prodigy started to do what few dance acts before them
had done - they gigged. Bands like N-JOI and Shades of Rhythm had built up a
large fan base long before the Prodigy's arrival, but it was the sheer weight
of hard work that saw Howlett's band leapfrog all of their peers within a matter
of a few months. Their early shows were sometimes ill-attended, like their fifth
gig at Hatfield College where there were only nine people in the crowd, including
five staff. Conversely, their twelfth gig was at Raindance, a massive rave attended
by 12,000 people.

Infact, a feature of the acid house scene was that if offered fledging bands
the chance to play to thousands of people, in a way that young rock acts could
only dream of. What made the Prodigy even more exceptional was that their show
was live, unlike the DAT-reliant P.A.'s of their contemporaries.

During Christmas 1990, Liam announced to the band that he had secretly signed
a record deal with XL a few weeks previously, though he was continuing to work
at "Metropolitan". At the time, he hadn't been too sure of how the
other members of the band would take to their particular roles, so the news
had been kept from them. but now, on the evidence of their recent gigs, he was
convinced that the Prodigy was the right vehicle to take his music to a wider
audience. However, for Sharky, the idea of even more band commitments was too
much, and so she left at Christmas.

now trimmed down to a four-piece, the Prodigy continued gigging non-stop to
support the "What Evil Lurks" EP, issued in February 1991. They were
rewarded by sales of 7,000 copies and massive underground airplay. It was an
impressive start. In an attempt to tighten up their live show, the band met
at Liam's house one afternoon to rehearse. However, away from the vibe and atmosphere
of the shows, with hundreds or even thousands of people dancing to their music,
the band found the situation impossible. After 20 minutes of arguments and uncomfortable
shufflings from Leeroy and Keith, they called it a day. The Prodigy have never
rehearsed since.

At this time, Liam was in a habit of partying until late, then returning home
and writing material while still in the party vibe. It was this method that
produced the Prodigy's next single, "Charly". After seeing a 70's
children's information film, featuring a strange tortoise-shell cat and his
interpreting infant chum, Liam spriced the phrase "Charly says always tell
your Mummy before you go off somewhere" onto a tough and innovative back-beat.
"I thought it was so hilarious", Liam says. "It was the bollocks.
I thought that if I put that to a really hard sound it would result in something
totally new. "

The group had been playing various raggae-style mixes of the track since their
first gig at the Labyrinth, but it was Liam's hardest version (Alley Cat Mix)
which encaptured the public's imagination. By the time it was released in August
1991, pre-orders were huge and the resulting rush of sales propelled "Charly"
to number 3 in the national charts. The video was featured on "Top of the
Pops" and "The Chart Show", and the band played to a massive
30,000 punters at the next perception rave. Soon after, Liam gave up his day
job.

With the huge success of "Charly", the Prodigy rollercoaster really
began to accelerate. Having already established themselves as the premier name
to emerge from the rave scene, they were now in demand for live shows. Their
third single, "Everybody in the Place", issued in December 1991, was
accompanied by European and American dates, which were followed by the signing
of the American label Elektra. At the same time, Liam's musical prowess was
acknowledged by being asked to remix Art of noise, Dream Frequency and Take
That (he turned down Gary and chums).

All seemed to be going remarkably well - until, that is, the negative impact
of a scurrilous press hatchet job knocked them back for a while. One dance magazine
had claimed that "Charly" had opened the floodgates for so-called
"kiddie rave", like Urban Hype's "Trip to Trumpton" and
Smart E's "Sesame's Treet", which they argued, reduced this important
sub-culture to a laughing stock.

Despite this irritating setback, the Prodigy continued to progress. The alternative
rock market was increasingly taking notice of their music, and the band's blistering
shows at Sheffield Sound City and XL's Vision festival reinforced their reputation
as one of the country's great live acts. The question was, could they repeat
their success on an album level?

After their fourth single, "Fire", maintained their unbroken chart
run, their debut double album proved the answer was "yes". "The
Prodigy Experience", a playful echo of the legendary Jimi Hendrix experience,
was comfortably the finest LP to come from the rave scene. As Nick Halkes of
XL Records states: "I think it was pretty unique in context - other than
the Prodigy there wasn't really an artist that came out of that movement that
people really felt comfortable with, or excited about. There were no real reference
points at all. I am not saying that the Prodigy reached an incredible pinnacle
with "Experience" but it was innovative, it was exciting, and it showed
there was more depth to the band, and that they could move forward".

With a 23-date tour to support the record, the group continued to gig relentlessly,
and the combination of unique music and hard work rewarded them with a number
12 album, which stayed in the top 40 for six months (it soon went platinum).
This period should have heralded their most productive spell yet, but by the
time they had toured the album around Europe, America, Australia and Japan,
they'd become deep in debt and were on the verge of splitting up.

Kicking off with dates in Australia, the band's schedule allowed them only
two days off in a month-and-a-half. To make matters worse, many shows were poorly
promoted and the majority of American promoters failed to pay up. Added to the
poor touring conditions and unsuitable billings, the whole experience turned
out to be a nightmare. Keith remembers: "We should have known because of
the way that Leeroy reacted - he's so laid back, and you know that if he is
unhappy and miserable with something then there is a very real problem. "
We said that we were never going to tour again after that, we were so pissed
off, 70 gigs over Christmas and the New Year and yet we still came home in debt
and very run down. "

"At various points along the tour we all left the band", he continues.
"Now we look back at the whole episode in retrospect and as a trial and
a learning experience. Just because everything's not a bed of roses doesn't
mean that you are not learning, and that's the best way of looking at things
like that. "

The final singles from the debut album were "Out of Space" and "Wind
it Up" which, despite the band's mediocrity, continued the Prodigy's fine
tradition of Top 20 hits. However, by the time that had started to recover from
their American nightmare, Liam was wary that the band were in danger of being
dragged down with the dying rave scene. Things had to change.

The problem was that, with the group's massive commercial success, many underground
critics were writing them off as "sell-outs", and they experienced
increasing difficulty getting their records played on the DJ circuit. So, in
the summer of 1993, they released their new single as a white label under the
pseudonym "Earthbound" (the name of Liam's home studio).the lysergic,
anthemic minimalism of the track was a stark change, as Liam recalls "One
Love was quite a big jump". it was more of a housey tune, less breakbeats,
and that could have lost us all the previously followed us for the breakbeat
element. In a way, the whole scene at that point was confused and unsure, and
it was splitting up into various categories, with one set of DJ's going one
way and others going elsewhere.

"I didn't want to get involved in all the internal politics", he
goes on. "That would have restricted me creatively, I would have been too
limited. So "One Love" came from that. The B-Side incorporated the
Jonny L mix, which was more German techno with a touch of breakbeat, so it was
still a hard record. The whole EP was a strong sign that we wanted to do things
differently. I realised that the band had to progress and evolve, that I had
to get back to the music and evolve.

"One Love" received rave reviews and in the media and massive play
on the DJ scene, with copies of the white label at one time changing hands for
up to 120. The Prodigy waited for all the acclaim to roll in and then
announced that that it was in fact their own latest offering. The ploy had worked
perfectly, as the track had single-handedly broken down many of the preconceptions
surrounding the Prodigy and had opened up a whole new potential for Liam's work.

It was the pivotal turning point in the Prodigy's career. Vitally, it gave
Liam a free licence to experiment on the second album, on which he started work
in late 1993. Whilst working with Liam on this record, Neil McClellan noticed
his unique writing approach. "I sense that Liam was straining at the leash,
that he wanted to go deeper and heavier. Once he came into the studio I realised
very quickly that I was dealing with a unique writer. His approach is really
bizarre, and I have never seen anyone write music in the same way that Liam
does. He plays everything in manually, rather than looping sections all the
time. It's amazing to watch, and can be so fast. There is nothing traditional
about his work. The point to remember is this: it is really easy to write bad
electronic music, because anyone can sit in front of a computer, but to write
good electronic music is very, very difficult. Liam does that. "

The release was preceded by the band's finest track so far, the hard 150bpm
techno of "No Good (Start the Dance)", which was accompanied by a
superb video of a seedy underground party which earned the group extensive MTV
exposure. Despite the continued singles success and ground swell of live support,
no one could have imagined the response that greeted the Prodigy's second album,
"Music for the Jilted Generation". It went straight in at Number 1
in the album charts, and went on to be a Mercury award nominee and sell over
1 million copies worldwide.

With the highly contemporary context of fighting the Criminal Justice Bill,
this was a propulsive modern dance record, and other-worldly opus of with layer-upon-layer
of fractious patterns, supremely organised hooks, neat arrangements, bridges
and breakdowns all building into an immense pitch of tension and emotion. It
was far more dynamic and dark than the linear tunes of the first album.

There were many heavy breakbeats, jazz-funk grooves, manical guitars, a return
to hip-hop (Poison) and a straight hard dance track (No Good Start the Dance).
Throughout the record, the sampled dialogue and twisted snatches of voices helped
evoke a range of moods and ideas, spliced with subtle, anti-social polemic,
and a deceptive delicacy of production and writing. It was an expression of
aural hedonism which informed one of the most notable dance records ever written.

The critics' response was as frenzied as the record-buying public's. NME called
Liam a "modern-day Beethoven", and there was barely a bad review in
sight. The album's success was bolstered by the fact that, on average, the Prodigy
played a gig every three days in 1994, all over the world. They ever played
to a huge crowd in Iceland, and won "Best Dance Act" at the MTV awards.

They also started playing at the major festivals, including the Feile festival
in Ireland (attended by 35,000 people), and have since established themselves
as one of the top festival bands in the country. With all four singles from
the album going Top 15 ("Voodoo People" hit No.11 and "Poison"
got No.8), it was a period of universal success for the band, and with Maxim's
vocals being used for the first time on "Poison", the musical possibilities
for the band increased even more.

1995 was spent consolidating their reputation as "The Greatest Rock 'n'
Roll band in the world" by playing numerous festivals and yet more gigs.
(Their performance at Glastonbury 1995 was hailed as "The Greatest Show
on Earth"). The first taste of new material from their third album came
in March 1996 with the release of "Firestarter", a hardcore, industrial-strength
techno white-out, on which dancer Keith Flint took the limelight with his sneering,
manic vocals. Despite it's extreme nature, the radio play it received was enormous,
and the track smashed in at Number 1 in the singles charts. When the video for
the track was shown on "Top of the Pops", the BBC received sackfuls
of complaints from angry parents saying that Keith was too scary for early evening
viewing, despite the fact that no drugs, guns, violence, or swearing were featured
in the video. One letter raged "This young man is clearly in need of urgent
medical attention. " Despite, or more likely because of this, the record
sold over 750,000 copies in less than six weeks, and was Number 1 in seven European
countries.

With the band signing a huge deal with Geffen in America, the Prodigy are proof
that the "no compromise" punk ethic lives on in their attitudes to
business and their often-extreme music. Despite their achievements, the band
continue to shun publicity, and avoid any trappings of the fame game.

They still control their own merchandise, and have absolute authority over
record releases, tours, videos and virtually all aspects of their operation.
With Liam having the capacity to write, engineer, produce and master an album
in his own studio, the Prodigy have demystified and streamlined the process
of making records. They are true electronic punks.

Although a new single, "Minefields" has recently been pulled (leaving
rare test pressings and advance cassettes), their third album is scheduled for
an autumn 1996 release. Liam is already clear about the ethos about it's inception.
"We are not trying to be punk", he explains. "But that's just
how it comes out. There are so many bands obsessed with guitars and drums and
that doesn't necessarily mean that you are punk. We're into the band's energy,
and at the moment in terms of that new record, punk just represents what the
Prodigy is all about".